Malik Hassan Naveed
e most formidable editors and tyrannical designers have always been
at heart starstruck movie buffs, and their fellow dream weavers in the
film industry have graciously returned the compliment, offering up
sylphs to adorn and epochs to revive. Reflecting on the golden age of
Hollywood, Diana Vreeland rhapsodized, “Everything was larger than life.
The diamonds were bigger, the furs were thicker and more.” Vreeland’s
extravagantly outré 1960s Vogue spreads were sometimes mod allusions to such favorite over-the-top spectacles as The Scarlet Empress,
featuring the sable-swathed Marlene Die­trich. Elsa Schiaparelli based
the surrealistic torso-shaped bottle for her signature scent, Shocking,
on the hourglass physique of Mae West, whom she dressed as the
man-eating Fifi in Every Day’s a Holiday. Lured by Samuel
Goldwyn’s million-dollar offer to elevate the taste of his stars,
Schiap’s arch-rival Coco Chanel embarked for Hollywood in 1931. But,
denouncing the town as “the Mont-Saint-Michel of tit and tail,” Chanel
lingered barely long enough to clothe celluloid siren Gloria Swanson for
Tonight or Never, dressing her as a Coco clone, in a belted
tweed suit. In spite of the couturière’s early antipathy for movie
actresses, the house of Chanel was among the first to enlist film idols
as models. For years Catherine Deneuve appeared as the flawless face of
the brand, and a whole phalanx of red-carpet royalty—Vanessa Paradis,
Nicole Kidman, Keira Knightley, Audrey Tautou, and Blake Lively—has
since followed in her spangled wake.